This chapter presents the many opinions, assessments, interpretations of the Aquino presidency by journalists, academics, and politicians. This article is a good source for exploring how she used official power and whether or not she was a “weak” president. Teachers could also assign this reading and ask students to compare Aquino’s exercise of power with that of Imelda Marcos.

This introduction gives a brief sketch of Kartini’s life and engages with the question of whether she is a feminist or a nationalist. It contextualizes her work in the history of the Indonesian nationalist movement. The rest of the book is a collection of Kartini’s letters to Stella Zeehandelaar, her Dutch friend who had inspired her feminist ideas.

Diaz, Ramona. Imelda. 2003; Singapore: Golden Village, 2004, VHS.

A documentary using interviews with Imelda Marcos that allows the viewer to hear her words and make their own interpretations.

There is a chapter by Mina Roces entitled: “Is the Suffragist an American Colonial Construct: Defining ‘the Filipino woman’ in Colonial Philippines” which is a good companion to the reading. There are also chapters on women’s suffrage in Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam. This is the most recent and up to date one. There are few works published in this field. Prior to this volume the only other study was by Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World. London: Zed Books, 1985.

This chapter is written by a social anthropologist and traces the recent popularity of the ao dai (Vietnamese National dress for women) when Miss Vietnam won “best national costume” at an international beauty pageant.

Lyons, Lenore. A State of Ambivalence, The Feminist Movement in Singapore. Leiden: Brill, 2004.

Singapore second-wave feminism. Or her article, Lyons, Lenore, “A State of Ambivalence: Feminism in a Singaporean Women’s Organization.” Asian Studies Review 24.1 (2000), 1-24. These are the first studies of AWARE, the feminist women’s organization in Singapore.

This article talks about veiling and its connections with the rise of the dakwa movement in Malaysia in the 1970s. It argues that women who veil are middle class, educated, urban and modern.

Othman, Norani, ed. Shari’a Law and the Modern Nation-State A Malaysian Symposium. Kuala Lumpur: Sisters in Islam, 1994.

This collection of essays was published by SIS and edited by one of their founders and leading feminist. This is one of their early academic publications and deals very much with women and Hudud law.

Roces, Mina. “Gender, Nation and the Politics of Dress in 20th Century Philippines.” Gender & History (forthcoming, 2005).

Explores how women and male politicians manipulated the semiotics of dress for political agendas. Looks at the contrast between Western Dress/National Dress used to express opposing political identities and how women’s dress is the “other” of men’s dress. This goes through several eras (one century) in Philippine history. Looks at how male and female presidents manipulated dress, and how activists such as suffragists and nuns (the habit) used dress to negotiate for political spaces. An alternative would be Roces, Mina. “Women, Citizenship and the Politics of Dress in 20th Century Philippines.” In Qi Wang, Wil Burghoorn, Kazuki Iwanaga, and Cecilia Milwertz, eds., Gender Politics in Asia—Processes of Change and Empowerment, (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, forthcoming, 2005). Focuses on women’s use of dress to negotiate political spaces, including the nun’s habit, and the indigenous women’s use of undress as a form of protest.

This is the first study documenting the concept of “unofficial power” in the Philippines and uses case studies of Mrs. Marcos and wives, sisters, mothers, daughters and mistresses of male politicians.

Sekimoto, Teruo. “Uniforms and Concrete Walls Dressing the Village Under the New Order in the 1970s and 1980s.” In Nordhold, Henk Schulte, ed., Outward Appearances Dressing State and Society in Indonesia. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1997.

This chapter has a similar approach as the one by Taylor but applies it to the 1970s. Sekimoto observed the dress of Indonesian officials and their wives at independence day ceremonies. Political men wore safari suits but their wives wore the sarong and kebaya. The anthology Outward Appearances (above) is also recommended since it has chapters on the uses and meanings of dress in Indonesia from the colonial period to the contemporary era.

This chapter by a well known anthropologist who had written extensively on the middle class in Malaysia explores the reasons why middle class women wear the veil and includes the argument that veiling is one way Malaysian women can assert a non-Western form of modernity.

This chapter focuses on the analysis of the official photograph of the Indonesian independence day ceremony which showed the Indonesian president (Sukarno) in Western suit and the women in sarong and kebaya (Indonesian national dress). The original photograph had two other women in it in Western dress. This part of the photograph was cropped so that women in the photograph appeared in native dress and veiled. Taylor then analyzed this photograph in terms of how Sukarno presented the gendering of politics in the first day of independence with men in Western suits (as inheriting the power once exercised by the West—the Dutch), and women in national dress. Men were therefore associated with modernity and power, while women were embedded in the nations’ past.

Jean Gelman Taylor is a leader scholar of Kartini. She is among the first Southeast Asian specialists to write about Kartini. This essay is her last essay on the topic. It is a terrific summary of the life and work of Kartini.

This book is the most comprehensive study of GERWANI, the second-wave feminist organization in Indonesia that was linked to the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). The organization was destroyed with the PKI when President Suharto took power in 1965.

Wilson, Verity. “Dressing for Leadership in China: Wives and Husbands in an Age of Revolutions (1911-1976).” In Burman, Barbara and Turbin, Carole, eds., Material Strategies: Dress and Gender in Historical Perspective, a Gender and History Special Issue. London: Blackwell, 2003.

This chapter originally appeared in the journal Gender & History in 2002. This article focuses on Chinese politicians, but does an excellent job analyzing photographs of Sun Yat Sen and his wife, Chiang Kai-shek and Song Meiling, and Mao Zedong and Jiang Qing and their use of clothing.